I tuned in to NPR mid-September, 2002, and chanced upon an interview in progress. It was not an antagonistic interview—that is, the interviewer was not making the least attempt to challenge his interlocutor, or to oblige him to defend his views or positions from an even mildly adversarial confrontation. Rather, the interview was a friendly one; indeed, the relative positions of the interviewer and the interviewee were those of a student and teacher, or acolyte and guru. The questions were soft ball opportunities for the person being interviewed to hold forth in his opinions. This sort of interview is marginally useful to enable a listener more clearly to comprehend the positions taken by a subject since ideally he may organize and expand upon his thesis without interruption. However in this case it was not useful in that there was usually little in the way of coherent or logical argument presented; since there was no challenge, the subject meandered at will.
As to this particular interview, I was unfamiliar with both voices, recognizing neither man. I was familiar, however, with the positions taken. They were left-radical chic.
The interviewer would ask such questions as “Is the problem with Western culture (i.e., America) systemic?” and his professorial subject would slowly, carefully, in a rather becoming hesitating manner and a resonant, aged voice hold forth at some length on that topic. He was interesting to listen to; he kept it simple. After a while, I could see a rhetorical pattern: he would begin on the path, so to speak, and then veer off in a circuitous diversion that from time to time would cross, intersect or veer tangent to the main path. He would do this “loop about a line” pattern for a while, not saying much but rather effortlessly talking around the topic and finally come back to the interview by making a point, a statement, or an opinion, and then stop. For example, to the question posed above, he meandered over a rather large amount of terrain, making several egregious accusations of conscious, deliberate, vicious perfidy on the part of America in general, Americans as a group, and certain segments of the American population (businessmen mostly) in particular, and then he abruptly ended with the flat statement a propos of little in the preceding monologue, “Yes, it is the profit motive”, “it” being the problem presumably. Now, any well educated economist of any school will tell you that the profit motive by itself is morally neutral at worst, and at best is historically accreted with moral strictures culturally or legislatively applied, but none of that made its way into the monologue.
For, you see, there was no argumentation in any of this interview. There was no rational logic here, no statement followed by evidence, point or counterpoint, alternative view or even a stalking horse to demolish. There was only this: an ability to articulate simply and elegantly common beliefs and misconceptions in a compelling way, combined with a long and ready list of accusations of bad behavior on the part of my ancestors. There was nothing logical or even scholarly about it, but consisted of elegant circumlocutions followed by an unsupported opinion or a mere common assumption, often provably erroneous—but with nobody present to point out the error. Anyone seeking understanding would have found only a severe disjunction between reality and rhetoric—in other words, faulty opinions stated as fact.
My judgment after a while was that this was no great or even good mind at work, no profound thinker at all but a huckster, a pandering rhetorician.
Only at the end of the interview did I learn that the identity of this guy was Howard Zinn.
So of course I immediately corrected my opinion, to bring it into line with that of my academic colleagues, for whom Mr. Zinn was massively articulate: I now stand corrected, and have been much happier for all these succeeding years.
